Saturday, August 20, 2016

The forbidden fruit taken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden certainly seems like it had a sour taste. For indulging in a little knowledge, the two brought sin and death into the world, got kicked out of paradise, and were each assigned their own specially frustrating labor projects. Bible commentators down through history have noted an obvious lesson here: sometimes what we learn through experience is pretty bitter. Thanks to the actions of Adam and Eve, we all have been corrupted and stand in need of salvation... or so the story goes.

Some right-leaning academics and activists have likened the concept of privilege to that of Original Sin. Both are things we are born into, that we cannot escape, and they are best dealt with by a confessional or penitent approach. James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian draw this comparison in their article, "Privilege: The Left's Original Sin," published at AllThink.com. There is no greater sin in the eyes of the left, they claim, than "having been born an able-bodied, straight, white male who identifies as a man but isn't deeply sorry for this utterly unintentional state of affairs."1

Interesting similarities do exist between privilege and Original Sin, as noted. Yet concepts like apostasy, faith, and religion are frequently associated with secular ideas in ways that are more tenuous than they are convincing. The more the sacred retreats from the latter half of that equation, the weaker the analogy seems. If the mere association with religion is meant to be an indictment on talk of privilege, then Boghossian's unabashed borrowing from the evangelizing pages of Christian ministry in A Manual for Creating Atheists is no less guilty. Presumably, though, the main complaint is not the religious connection, but how privilege and Original Sin have both been used as shaming devices.

Certainly, privilege talk can be used to try and control or stop conversation. In that sense it is quite like Original Sin as it has been employed by brazen preachers spreading a message of hellfire and brimstone. But where many on the right have interpreted privilege in terms of personal attacks, many on the left have been endorsing it with the aim of calling attention to broader social issues. Mychal Denzel Smith, writing for The Nation, observes that when "people with privilege hear that they have privilege, what they hear is not, 'Our society is structured so that your life is more valued than others.' They hear, 'Everything, no matter what, will be handed to you. You have done nothing to achieve what you have.'"2 Apology and repentance are not the goals for those who partake of the language of privilege – social reform is the goal.

Discrimination is offered in the article as a better alternative to privilege. This may be splitting hairs, but it may also underscore a valuable point. Discrimination has a history behind it, especially a legal one, and it has often been addressed on an isolated, individual-case basis. To suggest that there are more systemic problems in our courts, in our neighborhoods, and in our society, a bigger word seems necessary. Privilege stings. It evokes an air of elitism, of undeserved benefit, and it plays off the anti-magisterial sentiments that have long been a part of American culture. Privilege is less visible than we imagine discrimination to be. It saturates and it structures, as Maggie Nelson has written.

Granted, privilege has its conceptual flaws, too. It's been argued that it associates the advantages of privilege with luxuries rather than with rights. Others have suggested that it's not very conducive to understanding differences among various minority groups. Of course, these are conversations worth having civilly, and they have been ongoing in many areas of social justice for some time now. Boghossian and Lindsay are also willing to give a modest bit of credit to the term, conceding that it does describe something real and problematic. What they object to is how privilege helps to "glorify" the struggles of certain identities lucky enough to be born into the right group, while serving as a club to beat on those born into the wrong group. If social reform is what privilege talk is about, then these concerns are actually some of the focus for change.

What if these common problems with Original Sin and privilege are actually due to a confrontational attitude rather than to any conceptual similarity? There are Christians for whom Original Sin is not a weapon with which to persecute unbelievers, but a reminder to be humble and forgiving towards others. In Romans 3, Paul considers the standing Jews and Gentiles have before God. "Do we have any advantage?" he asks. "Not at all!" No one is righteous, not even one, as he goes on to declare in verse ten. Could privilege not serve as a similar reminder to humility?

Oddly, after explaining that "everybody is privileged," and that Original Sin and privilege are identical except in that they inhabit different moral universes, Lindsay and Boghossian contend that a distinguishing difference between the two is that the label of privilege is even more contemptible because it's seen to be a hindrance to the less fortunate among us. But everybody is privileged, so who can rightly take the moral high ground? Some might still claim the moral high ground, though there's no real explanation for why this would be tolerated more in the case of privilege than in that of Original Sin. Fighting privilege doesn't mean forcing repentance.

Now, it's true that no analogy is perfect, but Boghossian and Lindsay are ambiguous enough in their use of the term privilege that it presents a problem for their argument. Let's take a definition of privilege by Sian Ferguson at Everyday Feminism. Ferguson says, "We can define privilege as a set of unearned benefits given to people who fit into a specific social group."3 This doesn't tell us anything about most of what Lindsay and Boghossian attribute to privilege, such as its being an accident of birth, being inescapable, applying to everyone, or demanding atonement. That's because these are ancillary ideas about the function of privilege in society. Just as the concept of sin differs from the doctrine of Original Sin, the concept of privilege differs from the political and philosophical theorizing that has surrounded it.

The problem is that if we're going to bring in these ancillary ideas about privilege in drawing a connection to Original Sin, why stop there? Boghossian and Lindsay try to conceal the breakdown of their analogy with the line of qualification stating that Original Sin and privilege inhabit different moral universes. It allows them a little leeway to conveniently gloss over major incongruities like the importance of power systems for understanding privilege, or the supernatural nature of sin. Privilege functions between oppressors and the oppressed, whereas Original Sin doesn't really recognize anyone as being "in power," oppressing us sinners. Lindsay and Boghossian almost note this difference when remarking on how the labeling of another person as privileged is sometimes taken as a personal hindrance to us. Sin, on the other hand, isn't just a moral or interpersonal affliction, it's a spiritual one, and the "mechanism" by which it's passed down is frankly mysterious – not at all like the way that privilege persists through oppressive social structures. There is also the fact that, unlike sin, privilege actually represents a goal to aspire to. Sin can be viewed as a disease in need of healing, but the point of social justice is not to eliminate the privileges some people enjoy, it's to extend them to more people.

I'm not sure why we should feel persuaded by the criteria of similarity raised by Boghossian and Lindsay. They seem somewhat cherry picked, but their significance can be questioned, too. Death is something we have no say over, it cannot be escaped, and it's been said that all of us are dying from the moment we're born. Yet we might question the purpose of comparing death to Original Sin, or to privilege, on such grounds. It could be claimed that death isn't as comparable for some reason or other, but we have just seen a few ways in which privilege isn't as comparable, either.

It's admittedly somewhat amusing that privilege is denounced primarily when it's treated as a tool for shaming. Boghossian and Lindsay have both written in defense of ridicule when it suits their purposes, and they inhabit their own universe with other champions of ridicule like John Loftus and Jerry Coyne. They've advocated for shutting down academic studies like philosophy of religion and biblical scholarship when they dare to defend Christian beliefs, and they're quite fond of conceptualizing faith as a virus, not to mention defining it so as to be basically synonymous with irrationality. So why does privilege shaming catch their ire? One would think they'd be chomping at the bit for the chance to attack Christian privilege in such terms, which they more or less do in other language.

When it comes to our own privilege, we typically aren't exactly eager to own up to things. I can honestly admit that I still struggle with this. As Parul Sehgal eloquently observes: "It's easier to find a word wanting, rather than ourselves. It’s easy to point out how a word buckles and breaks; it's harder to notice how we do."4 The first sin wasn't being born into a certain class or identity. It wasn't being part of a majority group that benefits from the marginalization of others. The first sin was arrogance. It was selfish pride that motivated disobedience, as Thomas Aquinas said in his Summa Theologica.

I agree wholeheartedly with Boghossian and Lindsay that more perspective, kindness, and charity are needed. However, it seems to me that their critique of privilege has missed the mark in a number of ways. There is room for improvement, especially in how we talk to and treat the disadvantaged, but the encouragement given to "focus more on the positive qualities" you want to instill in others rings a bit hollow. It makes it sound once again like everyone else is the problem. Perhaps this is where the critic has more in common with religion than he likes to think. It would be an understatement to say that monotheistic religions haven't had very good track records of protesting privilege. On the contrary, they've often put in a great amount of effort defending their own privilege against so-called heretics and apostates.

Perspective, kindness, and charity seem mismatched to the disdain for what Lindsay and Boghossian call the religion of identity politics. It's telling where all the faith-based imagery is located in the picture painted by the two authors, and their contempt for religion is more than evident from their own writings, one of which bears the charitable title of Everybody is Wrong About God. "You don’t get to denounce identity politics," as Sincere Kirabo points out, "when your monomaniacal depreciation of all things religious is literally grounded in homage to the politics of your most treasured identity: atheism."5 Not everything religion has taught is worthy of derision – especially when it comes to the idea that change must begin with ourselves. There is likewise nothing patently religious about seeing ourselves as benefiting from certain social structures that disadvantage others. We should reject this claim just as we reject similar claims declaring morality to belong to the special domain of religion. Privilege talk that fails to recognize the need for humility and compassion is talk that is rightly criticized. At the same time, a critique of privilege that cloaks its main argument in anti-religious and politically conservative rhetoric is not doing anyone the favors its writers think it's doing.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Aristotle famously thought that art imitates life. As video game technology has evolved beyond depicting simple shapes and movements, its ability to represent aspects of our world has increased exponentially. Game designers, like all artists, often draw inspiration from their environment, and thus a broad range of subjects and concepts find their way into many titles. Over the years, we have seen countless games comment on music, politics, cultural norms, ethics, science, art, literature, relationships, and much much more. Not surprisingly, religion is another real life influence that can appear in video games, although its ties to the medium are arguably the most strained of the lot.

Here are five examples, ranked in no particular order, of controversial religious content in video games.

5. LittleBigPlanet and the Qur'an

In 2008, the puzzle platform game LittleBigPlanet had a delayed release after it was brought to Sony's attention that a song licensed in the game contained spoken verses from the Qur'an. Translated from the Arabic, the verses say: "Every soul shall have the taste of death" and "All that is on earth will perish." Admittedly, these are odd choices for a children's game, but are they offensive enough to merit their removal?

The original notice came from a poster on the PlayStation community forums, who explained: "We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending," and asked that the song be removed. Sony complied and replaced the track in the game. However, some Muslims reacted against this, including The American Islamic Forum for Democracy, who criticized the censorship of the song in LittleBigPlanet. "Muslims cannot benefit from freedom of expression and religion," the group said, "and then turn around and ask that anytime their sensibilities are offended that the freedom of others be restricted."

The composer of the music in question, Toumani Diabaté, also considers himself a devout Muslim.

4. Brahmin in Fallout 3

One of the common inhabitants of the radiated post-apocalyptic Capital Wasteland in Fallout3 is the species of two-headed mutated cow known as Brahmin. These cuddly critters don't do much in the game aside from grazing, transporting goods, and occasionally attacking those who disturb their peaceful existence. Yet that existence is apparently so controversial that Fallout 3 was not released on any platform in India, citing "cultural sensitivities" as the reason why.

A detailed explanation was not provided, but it has generally been assumed that the Brahmin are the culprits. There is a caste of Hindu priests and scholars in India known as the Brahmin, and the name is also similar to Brahman and Brahma in Hinduism - the former which is considered the highest or ultimate reality, and the latter being a creator god. It has additionally been speculated that the belief in the sanctity of cows in India is a further reason for why the Brahmin of Fallout could be responsible for the game's cancellation there.

Of course, it's difficult to know what exactly motivated the decision. Interestingly, Fallout 4 did see a release in India, with the Brahmin remaining in, and at least one complaint about their presence in the game has since been made on a gaming forum. It seems that although war never changes, concern for cultural sensitivities does.

3. The Fire Temple in Zelda

The controversy surrounding the Fire Temple in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of the earliest examples of religious controversy in a video game that I can remember hearing. Well, aside from the general outrage over violent, evil, or allegedly un-Christian games that some religious groups used to love participating in. The Fire Temple thing wasn't just the usual "video games are corrupting the youth" nonsense. It was different and more surprising, given Nintendo's image of being family friendly and their longstanding policy of keeping religion out of their games.

Initial copies of Ocarina of Time featured music in the Fire Temple that was changed in later versions of the game. Nintendo has openly stated that the switch was due to an Islamic prayer chant being used in the original music (listen to the differences here). While no one had yet complained, the track was replaced to stay consistent with Nintendo's image. Allegedly, the chant was taken from a sound library, which was how it slipped under the radar.

Strangely, though, the Gerudo Symbol found on blocks, switches, and the Mirror Shield in Ocarina also looks quite like the crescent moon and star of Islam. In later releases, the design was altered drastically, but it's pretty curious how a Muslim prayer chant and a symbol very similar to an Islamic symbol could accidentally show up in the same game.

As a matter of fact, the Zelda games have a history of religious references that goes beyond Ocarina. The first game, Legend of Zelda for the NES, famously had a dungeon designed in the shape of a manji, the Buddhist symbol of good fortune. Link's shield bore the image of a cross as well, and the Book of Magic was even called the Bible in the Japanese version, complete with its own crucifix on the cover. Zelda II has the "Cross" as an item, which enables Link to see invisible enemies on his way through the Valley of Death. The Sanctuary in A Link to the Past is known as the Church in the Japanese original version, which makes sense of bizarre promotional artwork that shows Link praying before a cross in the place (prayer seems to likewise be how you enter the Desert Palace later in the game).

So if Link is a Christian crusader of sorts in the earliest Zelda games... how weird is it that Islam suddenly pops up in Ocarina?

2. Baptism in Bioshock Infinite

During the beginning of Bioshock Infinite, you must undergo baptism in order to progress the story. This apparently upset one player enough to prompt them to request a refund, and the religious themes in the game reportedly even bothered some of the team members who worked on it. Unlike the other games on this list, Infinite intentionally comments on real world religion, especially the sort that gets wrapped up tightly with American exceptionalism. It isn't the main focus of the game, but with all the questions of free will, redemption, suffering, and so forth that it raises, bringing in politics and religion to the stage could almost be considered inevitable.

If religious sensibilities are why LittleBigPlanet, Ocarina of Time, and many other games have revised their content, then Infinite makes no apologies in directly confronting and challenging those sensibilities. The baptism scene at the start is not disrespectful or mocking, nor does it make light of the ritual. It plays a part in posing problems many Christians already ponder, about false prophets, going through the motions, the mundane nature of evil, the reach of salvation, and more. In some ways, the game ismeant to be controversial, but what it draws attention to in the course of its beautiful tale of Booker and Elizabeth should be disturbing for plenty of reasons other than "blasphemy."

For those interested, I have written a longer review of religion in this game, exploring more of its ideas and controversy in greater depth.

1. Hitman 2 and the Sikh Temple

The Hitman games may just be some of the worst games to look to for any kind of religious deference. I mean, we're talking about games that simulate contracted murder, not games for kids or for generally sensitive folks. Even so, three missions in 2002's Hitman 2: Silent Assassin caught the ire of Sikhs who argued that they bear striking similarity to the tragic massacre that took place at Harmandir Sahib, or the Golden Temple, in 1984. The level description on the game's website (which has since been amended) spoke of an "ancient Gurdwara", or Sikh temple, and noted that an "uprising in this region in the mid 80's was ruthlessly cracked down on
by government-issued troops, and many innocents were killed." A number of turban-wearing Sikh assassins are your enemies in the level, referred to at one point as "towelheads" by a contact you meet early on in the Temple City Ambush mission.

Eidos responded by removing offensive material from both its website and the game, but most of the changes seem to have been cosmetic, such as censoring or altering words and images. Considering that this game was released fairly shortly after September 11th, the controversy may appear very different now, looking back almost 14 years later. Still today, American Sikhs continue to experience violence and bigotry perpetrated by ignorant individuals who mistake them for Muslim-Americans. Hitman 2 didn't help by contributing to these misunderstandings in its depiction of Sikhs as "cult" members, assassins, and terrorists, regardless of whether the location in the missions is actually meant to be the Golden Temple.

Contra Aristotle, Oscar Wilde remarked that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Likely the concern of many who object to religious controversies is that they can provoke other, potentially more harmful forms of discrimination. There does seem to be something to this, and it's probably one reason why most avid gamers find games like Hatred and Ethnic Cleansing abhorrent. On the other hand, censorship is almost never the best solution, not only because it limits the free expression of others, but because it can also significantly impact the attention given to something troubling.

As forms of artistic expression, video games should experiment in the provocative and controversial, and should largely be free to do so. But where we should draw the line and how we ought to respond to offensive material are also questions worth asking - ones that may be productively taken up by the various religious, political, philosophical, and social communities in our diverse world.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

The following is an excerpt from my critical review of Rick Broocks' Man, Myth, Messiah: Answering History's Greatest Question. Rice Broocks is a Christian apologist and the man who has inspired the God's Not Dead films. Man, Myth, Messiah is his 'companion' book to God's Not Dead 2.

Since 1975, Gary Habermas has been cataloging scholarly sources on
the resurrection of Christ to establish certain trends, or ‘minimal
facts’, accepted by most historians. In Man, Myth, Messiah, the number of these sources is given as “more than 2,200,” pulled from the 2007 book The Case for the Real Jesus. Just two years earlier, in a paper published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Professor Habermas numbered his sources at “more than 1400”.1
In the three decades Habermas took compiling those initial 1400, he
averaged a survey of around 47 publications a year. Yet afterwards, in a
mere two years, he managed to survey a whopping 800 additional
sources for his list. Of course, some may point out the qualified use of
“more than” in both of the total figures, but this ambiguity actually
exposes a general problem with Habermas’ research. As Richard Carrier
has noted, Habermas has not released his data – which is already quite
selective in its reliance on only English, German, and French written
sources – and so the trends he extrapolates from it are greatly
presumptive.2

On this flawed backdrop, we come to the alleged facts in chapter two
that “even skeptics believe.” These facts are built on solid historical
criteria, according to Broocks, like multiple and independent
attestation, a close proximity to the events in question, and the
presence of details too embarrassing to have been invented. With the
exception of the last criterion, I find this standard reasonable.
Embarrassment is a sticky issue in many ways, particularly because of
how it rests on judgments about the sorts of things that would’ve been
contrary to the purposes of an author living in the very distant past.
Perhaps in some cases where we have a good deal of information on the
norms in a given society, it can be plausible to make an argument from
embarrassment as a supplementary defense of historicity, but even then
there are challenging questions about individual attitudes and
‘hierarchies’ of tolerable to intolerable embarrassments.

Before laying out his first minimal fact, our author sets his sights
on Jesus mythicism. Denying the historical existence of Jesus is a “pop
culture”, “blogosphere” thing, a “tabloid” level absurdity, says Rice,
while suggesting a visit to Jerusalem would sway most rational minds.
“And you don’t need a scholar or historian. Any tour guide can set you
straight.” Although I am not a mythicist, I have to admit I find
ridiculing mythicism to be unproductive as well as uncharitable. Broocks
aspires to always be prepared to give an answer for his faith with
gentleness and respect, per 1 Peter 3:15-16, but on more than one
occasion he opts instead for resorting to strawmen and ad hominem
attacks on his opponents. “The real motivation for skeptics to deny
that Jesus really lived is not a lack of evidence,” he claims. “They
often desire to attack Christianity in any way possible because of the
evil perpetrated by self-proclaimed Christians.” (p. 28) Claims like
these, whether or not they’re true of some mythicists, seem
spectacularly inadequate at dealing with mythicists like New Testament
scholar Robert Price, Dominican priest Thomas L. Brodie, or historian
Richard Carrier.

Fact #1: He Was Crucified

Historical sources are even part of the supporting case for the first
minimal fact, making it especially unnecessary to wage such a verbal
war on mythicism. Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian, and the Talmud are cited as
evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus, and all have been used to
endorse historicity, too. While there are issues with each of these
sources that leave them open to objections, I think at least the first
two are fairly reliable, for the same reasons I gave in my review of God’s Not Dead.
It’s worth stating that this first fact, crucifixion, is really not an
argument for the resurrection in itself, but more of a stipulation to
it. Naturally, it could be that Christ was crucified and remained dead
after; the crucifixion is more a part of the minimal facts case to deter
the objection that Jesus appeared alive later because he had never
actually died. Since I don’t make that objection, I will not offer a
critique of the first fact.

Fact #2: His Tomb Was Found Empty

The second minimal fact is the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb by a
group of his women followers. Saying that all four gospels depict women
as the first to arrive at the tomb, Broocks notes that the testimony of
women was “usually dismissed in ancient trials. So no first-century
author would have ever made the story up.” (p. 31) Here is an example of
the embarrassment criterion in action. The unstated assumption is that
women were so distrusted in those days that the presence of them in the
resurrection narrative, when they could’ve been omitted or replaced,
makes the story more likely to be true. However, even the historian
Josephus hung his entire accounts of the incidents at Gamala and Masada
on the testimony of women.3 The fact that Rice is careful to
say that “usually” the testimony of women was dismissed is also
important. If there were instances in which women were treated as
reliable sources – including by one of the most prominent historians of
the era – then why should we think women in the resurrection story were
too embarrassing a detail for the empty tomb to have been made up?

Another argument made in favor of this alleged fact is that the Roman
and Jewish authorities could easily have squashed the Christian
movement by producing the body of Jesus. Since they did no such thing,
it must have been because the body was missing. Again, though, this is
quite an assumption. The New Testament itself claims that the disciples
did not begin preaching the risen Christ until about seven weeks
after the ascension (see Acts 2), at which point the corpse was likely
decayed beyond recognition. Add to that the small size of the early
Christian sect, as well as the fact that the earliest Christian writings
come 20-25 years after the death of Jesus, and it just doesn’t seem the
Romans or Jews would have had the motive to hound Christians over what
they were not exactly forthcoming with in the first place.

Skeptics of the empty tomb have often claimed it is unlikely that
Jesus would have received a proper burial. In what may be one of his
stronger counter-arguments in the chapter, Broocks responds to this
objection by contending that leaving the body on the cross would have
violated Roman laws urging respect for occupied peoples. “Jewish law
expressly commanded bodies of the condemned be buried so that the land
would not be defiled,” he states on page 32. Supporting these claims are
two sources: Josephus and the Digesta Iustiniani.

As Leonard Rutgers explains, Josephus mentions certain religious
freedoms the Romans did extend to the Jews, such as to “gather freely in
thiasoi, observe the Sabbath and the Jewish festivals, send
money to the Temple in Jerusalem, and enjoy autonomy in their communal
affairs,” as well as being “absolved from compulsory enrollment in the
Roman military.”4 But to call the Romans tolerant of Jewish
customs would seem to be a step too far. Rutgers goes on to say that,
“Roman laws of the first century C.E. that relate to Jews give the
impression that tolerance or intolerance was nothing but a by-product in
the formulation of a given policy. Conscious efforts to be tolerant or
intolerant do not seem to have been frequently made.” Indication of this
even comes from Josephus, who notes in book 2, chapter 9 of The Jewish War
how Pilate spent money from the sacred treasury to build an aqueduct,
and then sent undercover soldiers to disrupt the mob of protest that
ensued.

In book 48, title 24 of the Digesta Iustiniani
(Digest of Justinian), we read: “The bodies of persons who have been
punished should be given to whoever requests them for the purpose of
burial.” Broocks cites New Testament scholar Craig Evans saying that
burial would have been expected in the time of Jesus. In a paper
commenting on the Digesta, Evans notes that most of the text is
drawn from Roman jurist Ulpian, who lived from about 170-223 C.E.
“Ulpian,” writes Evans, “goes on to say that ‘the bodies of those who
have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and
permission granted’. A statement in the lex Puteolana (at II.13)
gives the impression that Romans, as did Jews in Israel, had burial pits
reserved for criminals and others buried without honor.”5 Evans refers to a book by J.G. Cook that discusses the lex Puteolana.
“Some of the corpses were denied burial,” Cook remarks, “apparently at
the discretion of the magistrate,” and common burial pits “‘were in use
already in the second century BC.'”6 Cook and Evans both mention a particular passage in the Digest
that specifically states that permission for burial is not always
given, “especially where persons have been convicted of high treason.”
(48.24.1). Evans argues in his essay that the mention of treason does
not apply to Jesus, but the passage appears to give treason as an
extreme example rather than the only exception.

Bart Ehrman names a number of historical sources describing how crucifixion victims were often left to rot on the cross:

The Roman author
Horace says in one of his letters that a slave was claiming to have done
nothing wrong, to which his master replied, “You shall not therefore
feed the carrion crows on the cross” (Epistle 1.16.46-48)…
Artemidorus, writes that it is auspicious for a poor man in particular
to have a dream about being crucified, since “a crucified man is raised
high and his substance is sufficient to keep many birds” (Dream Book 2.53)… there is a bit of gallows humor in the Satyricon of Petronius, a one-time advisor to the emperor Nero, about a crucified victim being left for days on the cross (chaps. 11-12).7

There are a few important things to take from all this. First, there
is reasonable doubt that Roman officials in the first century respected
Jewish practices and beliefs as a matter of habit. We have seen both
scholarly argument and a historical example for this, and it is perhaps
further instructive to consider the Jewish-Roman war that arose just a
little over three decades after the purported death of Jesus. Second,
while it seems that some crucifixion victims were allowed to be buried
in special cases, others were denied burial. Although it’s not entirely
clear what all the circumstances were that could lead to a denial, the
“stereotyped picture that the crucified victim served as food for wild
beasts and birds of prey,” as conservative Christian Martin Hengel once
remarked,8 suggests that being left on the cross was not a
punishment reserved for only the worst of traitors. As a third point,
there is a lack of clarity in this material about what kind of burial
was allowed in which cases. It’s fair to assume that since giving the
body to “relatives” is mentioned by Ulpian, the relatives would likely
bury their beloved in a family tomb or something of the sort. Yet when
the body is that of a troublemaker or perceived criminal who supposedly
had a lot of enemies among the Jewish leaders, the law in Deuteronomy
21:22-23 could have been respected and the Sabbath could have been
honored simply by burial in a common grave. Since Pastor Broocks’ main
objection to improper burial is Roman respect for Jewish law, this
possibility, conceded by both Evans and Cook, poses a significant
problem.

Surprisingly, the “unanimous” early church tradition on the site of
Christ’s grave is another supporting argument made in defense of the
empty tomb. “Custom required Jesus to be buried outside the walls,” Mr.
Broocks states, “so the tradition for the site’s location had to go back
to within ten years of the resurrection.” (p. 32) The Church of the
Holy Sepulchre is the earliest known site to be identified with the tomb
of Jesus. Eusebius reports in his Life of Constantine that the
tomb had a pagan temple built over it by the Romans to “obscure the
truth.” Under Constantine, the temple was then demolished and replaced
by a church. Constantine’s own mother allegedly found the “true cross,”
which proved its power by restoring a corpse to life. Curiously, though,
there is no evidence prior to the 4th century that links the location
to the resurrection story. In her book, Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins,
historian Joan E. Taylor argues that Constantine chose the site as part
of his campaign to Christianize paganism, and the temple he built over
was never constructed with the purpose of concealing the tomb of Christ.
The absence of early veneration for any alleged site of Jesus’ grave,
especially from Paul’s trip to Jerusalem, is a strong argument against
the empty tomb legend.

It’s worth noting that Gary Habermas does not include the empty tomb
among his minimal facts because 1/4 of the scholars he surveyed are
skeptical of it, which Rice notes as well. Our author tries to dismiss
the divergence here: “This drop is likely due to the profound
implication of an empty tomb. If Jesus were buried after His death, then
the empty tomb would be a decisive additional piece of evidence for the
disciples encountering a physical Jesus.” (p. 31) However, we have just
seen numerous reasons why the empty tomb is a questionable ‘fact,’
reasons all based in historical evidence. In addition, if the empty tomb
is so critical to the Christian faith, then it seems the very same
reasoning could be used against Broocks and other believers to suggest
that bias is why they favor an empty tomb.

Fact #3: His Disciples Believed He Appeared to Them

As certain as Christ’s crucifixion, Broocks says, is the fact that
his followers had experiences of him after his death. We find these
appearances mostly in Paul and John, but Acts is also included with the
caveat that the historical reliability of the text is disputed. 1
Corinthians 15:3-8, often regarded as an early Christian creed by
scholars, reads:

For what I received I
passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins
according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on
the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to
Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than
five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom
are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to
James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also,
as to one abnormally born.

Rice calls this a “credible list” of witnesses, and makes special
mention of how Paul and James were skeptics before their conversions.
What exactly about this list is credible? The appearances to the five
hundred are frequently talked about by apologists as if we have five
hundred eyewitness accounts, when all we really have is this one account
saying that five hundred people saw the risen Jesus. No gospel or other
early Christian document tells of these unnamed, mysterious five
hundred. Most of the individuals identified in this list have left us no
first-hand account of their experiences. Notice also that there is
nothing said about women being the first to find the tomb – in fact, a
tomb isn’t even mentioned at all.

There is an unexplained dissimilarity between the experiences of Paul
and James. The story of Paul’s conversion is that he was a Jew
persecuting Christians up until his vision on the road to Damascus.
Thus, Paul was a skeptic converted by an appearance. James, on the other
hand, is considered a skeptic merely because of biblical references to
divisions in Jesus’ family (i.e. Mark 3:21, John 7:5), and we are given
no information for when James became a believer, whether it was before
or after the alleged appearance discussed in 1 Corinthians 15. Christian
scholar James F. McGrath shares this view, explaining that “even if
there were antagonism or otherwise soured relations between Jesus and
James, this does not in any way lead to the conclusion that the
estrangement lasted until Jesus’ death.”9 This matters
because, as apologists like Broocks assert, the conversion of a skeptic
due to a post-resurrection appearance is a more surprising deal than the
report of a devout believer that they witnessed a miracle.

So what about Paul? The vision described in Acts stands out in some
ways from the other appearances. Paul hears a voice and sees a light so
blinding that he falls to the ground and loses his sight. In Acts 9, his
companions hear a voice, but see nothing; in Acts 22, they see the
light, but don’t hear a voice. What’s odd about labeling this a
postmortem appearance is that Paul had never met Jesus while Jesus was
alive, and in his vision Paul doesn’t see Jesus – only a bright
light – he just knows (or assumes) it’s Jesus based on the voice. This
experience is quite similar sounding to a hallucination, and what’s
stranger still is that it is not distinguished in any way from the other
supposed appearances spoken of in the early creed.

Could multiple people have hallucinated the same thing, or something
quite like it? Broocks declares the Christian message “is not based on
some corporate self-delusion triggered by the disciples’ grief over
having lost their beloved leader; such a scenario would have required a
much longer period of time to develop.” (p. 38) But why think this?

On the hallucination theory, philosopher Keith Parsons writes:

In fact, the article “Hallucinations” in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Psychology, says that 1/8 to 2/3 of the normal
population experiences waking hallucinations… Causes of hallucinations
in normal persons include social isolation, rejection, and severe
reactive depression. The disciples were very likely to be experiencing a
strong sense of rejection, isolation, and depression after the
execution of Jesus. Further, it is very common for the bereaved to
experience visual or auditory hallucinations of their deceased loved
ones.10

Not all hallucinations require a good length of time, either, as Matthew McCormick explains.

When people lose
someone they love, it is quite common for them to have hallucinations of
the person (or even a pet) shortly after the loss. The phenomenon is
now well documented and is known as a bereavement hallucination.
In one study, a remarkable 80 percent of elderly widows reported having
hallucinations – either visual or auditory – up to one month after the
spouse had died… And these are not just fleeting glimpses or vague
feelings that these widows and widowers are experiencing. They report
seeing or hearing the lost person in some familiar environment, being
visited in their dreams, or having complete conversations with them
while being wide awake.11

We’ve already seen that not all experiences of the risen Jesus are
equal. Paul’s vision in Acts is very different from the appearances in
John 20. Other appearances, to the five hundred, to James, or to
unspecified apostles, are so devoid of any description that it would be
sheer speculation to imagine what those experiences might have been
like. Worse yet, since Paul is thought to have relayed an early creed
pertaining to appearances to some of the same people we find in the
gospels, this creed raises doubts about whether the sources we have are
truly independent. Perhaps John and Acts relied on the same material
Paul relied on. Noting this problem of ambiguity, there just doesn’t
seem to be any reasonable grounds for claiming that the postmortem
appearances were shared by so many people that hallucination is out of
the question. To make that argument, we would need more and better
evidence for the array of alleged experiences.

Fact #4: Proclaimed Early

For the fourth fact, Broocks provides the earliness of the preaching
of the resurrection. Because “creeds require time to become
standardized, the original teaching had to have originated years
earlier” (p. 37). Habermas is cited as claiming that such teaching must
go back to within fewer than five years of the death of Jesus. This is
said to be a consensus view of even critical scholars, but we have
previously seen the flaws in the survey approach used in Habermas’
resurrection research. Nonetheless, if we assume that the resurrection
was preached so early after the crucifixion – which I am actually
willing to grant – is this a fact supporting the historical reality of
Christ’s resurrection?

This is where the trouble with assessing miracles through historical
method becomes especially apparent. The reports of Joseph Smith’s vision
of the angel Moroni are very close to the time he supposedly had his
vision. Likewise, as Matt McCormick argues, there is substantial
evidence surrounding the Salem witch trials:

…hundreds of people
were involved in concluding that some of the accused were witches.
Eyewitnesses testified in courts, signed sworn affidavits, and
demonstrated their utter conviction that those on trial were witches.
Furthermore, the accusers came from diverse backgrounds and social
strata, including magistrates, judges, the governor of Massachusetts,
respected members of the community, husbands of the accused, and so on.

…The trials were part of a thorough, careful, and exhaustive
investigation. The investigators deliberately gathered evidence and made
a substantial attempt to view it objectively and separate truths from
falsehoods, mistakes, and lies. In the court trials, they took great
care to discern the facts. The accusers must have become convinced by
their evidence…

The witch trials were historically recent, so we have hundreds of the
actual documents that were part of the evidence. We have the signed,
sworn testimonies of the eyewitnesses claiming to have seen the magic
performed – not as it was repeated and relayed for decades to others,
but immediately after it occurred. We have whole volumes written by
witnesses to the trials, such as those by Cotton Mather and John Hale.12

Should we then believe Joseph Smith really was a prophet, or that
those convicted in the witch trials really were witches? I should say
not. The reason why involves a lot of what has already been covered.
What we know (or don’t know) of those reporting the event, of the time
and place in which they lived, and of the subsequent developments and
advances in our general knowledge has to play a significant role in our
approach, beyond a basic consideration of criteria like multiple and
independent attestation, closeness in time, or embarrassment.

Further Facts

Additional facts are presented in the chapter that have already been
touched on at this point, in one way or another. These involve Paul,
James, the growth of the early church, and the baptism of Jesus by John
the Baptist. To say brief words on the latter two, however, I find the
absence of any figures or statistics on the growth of the church makes
such a ‘fact’ indefensible, and the purportedly embarrassing nature of
Jesus’ baptism hangs on an incredibly thin supposition that it “could”
be seen as implying the superiority of John. I mention a study by Keith
Hopkins in my review of God’s Not Dead which argues that
Christians composed only 10% of the Roman population by the year 300. If
the early church exploded in the miraculous way many Christian
apologists claim it did, these are the kinds of studies that need to be
produced to substantiate their claim. As for John and Jesus, Mark 1:7
effectively eviscerates any notion of embarrassment: “And this was
[John’s] message: ‘After me comes the one more powerful than I, the
straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.'”

As a conclusion to my (very long) review of this chapter, I want to
make one last argument regarding these minimal facts – one which I
believe greatly reduces their persuasiveness on top of all that’s been
said so far. Throughout the chapter, Pastor Broocks makes frequent note
of how “all four gospels” mention the crucifixion, the women at the
tomb, Joseph of Arimathea requesting the body, John baptizing Jesus, and
“supernatural confirmations of Jesus’ ministry” (p. 30, 31, 41). These
remarks are misleading in that they give the impression that such
details are independently and multiply attested by more sources than is
likely accurate. The Two-Source Hypothesis in New Testament scholarship,
which is the consensus view among even most conservative scholars, has
it that Mark was a primary source for both Matthew and Luke. This is
even addressed somewhat in the very next chapter of the book, and it’s a
little suspicious why something so obviously pertaining to the
historical criteria is put after the minimal facts case. The
importance of this is that something which appears in all four gospels
may only really be independently and multiply attested in two gospels once we take parallel passages into account.

Let’s take the women at the tomb as our example. After stating that
this is found in all four gospels, Rice says, “This fact is significant
because the testimony of women was usually dismissed in ancient trials.”
The significance the author sees here is not just the reporting of
women at the tomb, but clearly also the reporting of women at the tomb
in four sources. Yet when we look at Mark 16:1-8, Matthew 28:1-8, and
Luke 24:1-12, we find a number of similarities and parallelisms, from
the two Marys to the fear of the women to the presence of men/angels
(one in Mark) in white clothing and more. We even find some plausible
spots where the authors of Matthew and Luke changed the text from Mark,
such as Matthew 28:8, which adds that the women were not just afraid,
but “filled with joy,” and so ran to tell the disciples what they’d
found – quite an improvement over Mark’s original ending, where the
women “said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” None of these
details occur in John’s gospel. This illustrates how Matthew and Luke
relied on Mark, and it changes the scope of attestation for the women at
the tomb from four to two sources. If Helmut Koester is right, though,
about Mark and John sharing a passion narrative source that is also
represented in the Gospel of Peter, then the evidence for women at the
tomb comes down to a lonely single attestation.13

When we move outside the realm of guesswork based on a questionable
survey, and go into dealing with the problems and arguments that
historians deal with, the picture becomes far more complicated with
respect to which sources are reliable and for what reasons. The minimal
facts case not only faces objections from a methodological perspective,
for inferring a supernatural explanation out of historical data, but
also from an evidential perspective.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

If the smash hit success of the Making a Murderer series on Netflix is a testament to anything, it might be that everyone loves a good courtroom drama. Over the course of almost any criminal trial, there is suspense, intrigue, and excitement as each side builds its case and new evidence is presented, eventually leading up to a verdict. Depending on the circumstances involved, many such trials can also be deeply emotional, eliciting anger, disgust, sadness, or sometimes joy even in people not in any way affiliated with the case. So-called "trials of the century," like those of Charlie Manson or O.J. Simpson, have garnered massive public attention in modern times thanks largely to press coverage. Skilled attorneys, unexpected discoveries, and undecided jurors help to make some trials into gripping roller coaster rides of anticipation

Christian apologists have published a number of best-selling books modeled on this format, most notably Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict (1972) and Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ (1998). More recent is Cold Case Christianity (2013), written by homicide detective J. Warner Wallace, as well as the upcoming film God's Not Dead 2, which teases a "court case" showdown that threatens to "expel God from the classroom". The idea of defending the faith in a legal setting even goes back to Jesus himself, who defends his ministry before the Jewish and Roman authorities in John 18.

But how fruitful really is this approach in attempting to justify the truth of Christianity? Part of its appeal is likely that it tries to reduce bias by working on a more neutral ground of debate - a secular ground, arguably. Another part of the appeal is that it seems to allow for an evaluative contrast: the case is made so strongly that we ought to believe it tells the truth. This is what Lee Strobel implies by noting in the ending chapter of his book, "I had seen defendants carted off to the death chamber on much less convincing proof!"[1] If Christ comes out favorably by even the high standards of the same justice system to which we trust countless human lives, then shouldn't we trust Christ?

Years before the publication ofthe aforementioned texts, philosopher Walter Kaufmann offered an insightful critique of this particular apologetic style:

An attitude often encountered among religious people and exemplified professionally by a great many preachers and theologians is that of the counsel for the defense. Here is an attitude toward truth quite different from the scientist's or the historian's, but no less methodical and disciplined and moral. Only it is governed by a different morality.

In many countries the counsel for the defense is expected to use all his ingenuity as well as passionate appeals to the emotions to gain credence for a predetermined conclusion - namely, that his client is innocent. He may ignore some of the evidence if he can get away with it, and he is under no obligation to carry out investigations which are likely to discredit his conclusion. If, after all that, he cannot convince the jury of the truth of his position, he will saddle his opponent with the burden of disproof; and if necessary he will rest content with a reasonable doubt that his position might be true.

Common though this attitude is toward religion, it is indefensible outside the courtroom, and it does not indicate a second type of truth.

In the first place, some unusual conditions obtain in the courts where this attitude is legitimate. The very fact of the indictment creates some presumption, psychologically, that the accused is guilty. Then, the prosecutor is an official of the government and aided by its vast resources, ranging all the way from its prestige to its police. Against such formidable odds the defense requires a handicap; and that is one reason why it is conceded the liberties that have been mentioned. In the case of religion, the situation is more nearly the opposite. Its advocates are aided by the government's prestige and by voluble testimony from officeholders and would-be officeholders; and the case for all kinds of religious propositions is proclaimed not only from the pulpits but in our most popular magazines, too, and in the press, and over radio and television, while the case against these propositions never gets a comparable hearing. If the courtroom analogy could be extended to the case of religion, the prerogatives mentioned should be granted to its critics to redress the balance.

Secondly, a jury is not asked to come up with the most likely story or even the most likely culprit. The jury is confronted with a single suspect, and truth is not the highest consideration. Better let two guilty men go free than punish one who is innocent.

Suppose that the major philosophic positions were haled into court, one at a time, each defended by a brilliant advocate. Surely, these attorneys - it could even be the same lawyer every time - would succeed time and again in raising a reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury that the position might be true. The attorney might not even have to try very hard if the prosecution were under pressure to pull its punches, as it is in the case of religion. Position after position would be acquitted. But such acquittal of a philosophy or a religion creates no presumption whatsoever that the position is probably true. In the end, those who care for a considered choice would still have the whole field to choose from.

We have here two different attitudes toward truth, but not two different types of truth. The second attitude, unlike the first, subordinates questions of truth to other questions of a moral kind. In fact, it might be argued that the verdict of the jury, "We find the accused not guilty," is not so much a determination of fact as it is a deceptively phrased recommendation for action. In line with this, the records show that when juries know that a finding of "guilty" makes the death penalty mandatory they will find the accused guilty much less often.

There is no need here to distinguish legal truth from other kinds of truth: such a distinction only prompts confusion. Consider a case that happens occasionally: some of the evidence against the accused has been obtained illegally or was not legally admissible in court, and the judge therefore directs the jury to find the accused not guilty. There is no point whatsoever here in introducing any conflict between types of truth. Clearly, the truth is in this case subordinated to respect for civil rights. And the situation can be explained perfectly in terms of the one and only kind of truth we have encountered so far.

"Guilty" and "not guilty" are, in the mouth of a jury, elliptical expressions which are only apparently identical with these phrases in other contexts. In a verdict they mean "proved guilty (or not proved guilty) in accordance with the special rules of evidence and argument that govern court procedure." Thus the accused may well be guilty in the ordinary sense but not guilty in this more restricted sense.

A jury operates under unusual conditions and is not expected to decide more than the special question whether the accused has been proved guilty in accordance with a certain set of rules. Neither the jury's attitude nor that of the counsel for the defense is at all appropriate when we are asked if a religious proposition is true or not true.[2]

Could the gospels or the resurrection hold up in a court of law, as apologists like McDowell, Strobel, and Wallace have claimed? One is tempted to respond: so what if they could? Our legal system does not establish truth. Moreover, it's not even clear what the charges might be that could reasonably be leveled against a faith like Christianity, nor is it clear why subjecting the beliefs of that faith to standards developed and intended for judging human social behavior at this specific time and place in history should be appropriate, let alone impressive in the event that everything stacks up well.

Friday, January 8, 2016

The annals of human history tell a familiar story. Were sentient extraterrestrial beings to read our histories, they would surely take note of our persistent labor to find our place in this world. Questions litter the pages of human history, pondering our identity, our reason for being, and our future. The struggle for survival seems to have birthed the struggle for meaning, for something more to the life we fight for than the mere hope of continued existence. Awakened into greater awareness with the development of human cognition, we find ourselves repeatedly asking, "Why?" - a characteristic which has been regarded by many as unique to our species.

Innumerable men and women have sought answers to these questions, and some claim to have found them, in religion. What we are is children of God. Our reason for being is that we were created by God, and, for some believers, our future is determined by the relationship we have with our creator. Life has meaning because God has given it meaning. We have a purpose because God, who created us, created us with purpose.

Yet the postmodernist wants to live without God, and without faith, as we hear from many a pulpit today. The man of the world and the woman of the world think they have moved beyond the need for God, beyond reliance on antiquated religious doctrines and dogmas. But without God, life ends at the grave, and if all concludes in death, what point is there to any of it? Dostoevsky is often cited for saying, "Without God, everything is permitted."

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig paints a vivid picture of this harrowing outlook in his essay, "The Absurdity of Life Without God." Setting aside the issue of whether or not Christianity is true, Craig attempts to show that the alternative - which he considers to be atheism, or naturalism - is untenable, unlivable, and awful. Life without God is absurd, he says, too absurd to be a rational decision about how one should live. "It seems to me positively irrational," writes Craig, "to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness."

Indeed, if this tremendous sense of decay and despair is actually what is entailed by living without God, perhaps we ought to rethink our doubts. One way in which Craig tries to underscore that a consistently godless life is absurd is by reference to atheists such as Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. The message is that these non-believers recognized the meaninglessness of their own worldview, and therefore serve as something like 'eyewitness testimony' in support of Craig's thesis.

However, the absurdity that Professor Craig shoulders atheism with in his essay is absurd primarily because it eschews certain theological notions of meaning, purpose, and value. Although part of the hopelessness is allegedly that life ends at death, even immortality would not count for anything unless it was God-given immortality. Thus, it all rests on God in Craig's argument, and life without God is absurd because, essentially, it's life without God. God is the only thing able to make life meaningful.

This is quite a contention, requiring more than just the supposed lack of objective value and cosmic purpose on a naturalistic worldview. Can meaning just be created into life, and the absurd vanquished, by the hand of a deity? In this article, I will contend that Craig under-appreciates the weight of absurdity - namely that he neglects a full treatment of the subject as it has been articulated in Camus, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. I suggest that his criteria for absurdity are weighty only insofar as they reflect this fuller understanding of the absurd. I will likewise argue that absurdity of this sort does not undermine atheism, but recommends it, in that it reveals the absurdity of even life with God.

My aim here will not be a comprehensive defense of Camus; specifically, I will not be diving far into the deeper aspects of his philosophy, such as his ethics. All I intend to show is that absurdity, it might be said, is a two-way street concerning theism and atheism. I begin with a summation of Craig's central claims, followed by a discussion of Camus' conception of absurdity, as well as the absurd in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. From there, I proceed to a critique of Craig's position, and then some final comment on living the absurd life.

I. Godless to Absurdity

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.1

For Craig, absurdity arises out of the absence of ultimate meaning, purpose, and value. Call these latter the Big Three. Throughout his essay, Craig has two main points to drive home: first, that life needs the Big Three to avoid being absurd, and second, that life can only have the Big Three with reference to God. A life that terminates in us passing out of existence, with no immortality and no God, is an absurd life.

The first point is a common intuition for many people. We like to think our lives have importance because of how they affect others, or because some of what we do can change history, but in the grand scheme of things, it appears to make no real difference. Craig is willing to grant that we partake in such "relative significance," while still emphasizing that none of it amounts to much. A lot of little meanings may satiate us for a time, but they are no substitute for Meaning with a capital M.

The threat of non-being looms large over every pleasure, every day, and every relationship. Science tells us the universe itself will one day become cold and lifeless, and so the fate of every creature is the same. What difference would it make if we had never existed, or if the universe had never existed? "This is the horror of modern man," Craig declares, "because he ends in nothing, he is nothing."

It would be a mistake to believe, however, that extending life indefinitely could suddenly make it mean something. If the short span of a lifetime is already without meaning, it is not clear how adding infinity to it would give it meaning. What is needed is a source of life's meaning, one capable of giving it a truly lasting significance. Nothing in this life seems able to fit that extraordinary bill. Most of us desire love and compassion in our lives, yet these come and go, and they end with death as well. If our fate is the same regardless of how we act, then why be loving or compassionate, anyway?

An uncreated universe, even if eternal, is a purposeless universe, according to Craig - a mere "cosmic accident," an absurdity. I said in the previous section that this view of absurdity is labeled as absurd primarily because it eschews theological notions about meaning, purpose, and value. Here we see this made most plain. Whatever meaning, value, and purpose might exist in this life, none of it can be of cosmic or ultimate significance if the universe is just the product of unintelligent, purposeless chance. Thus, Craig writes:

...if God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. Do you understand why the question of God's existence is so vital to man? As one writer has aptly put it, "If God is dead, then man is dead, too."

God alone can make life meaningful in the sense demanded by apologists like William Lane Craig. To say life is absurd is not to say it lacks any meaning, purpose, and value whatsoever, but that it lacks the right kind of meaning, purpose, and value that could elevate it above absurdity. As noted already, it is a common intuition that some greater, larger picture of significance must exist in order for all the little treasures underneath to have import. This intuition is frequently defended as one defends the most cherished of desires, with passion and conviction and an overwhelming sense of need. It is certainly defended this way by Craig, who stresses the "gravity" of the alternatives in so desperate a statement that if God is dead, "man is dead, too."

Yet ambiguity remains. What exactly constitutes the right kind, or right recipe, of the Big Three is not as easily reasoned as it may be intuited. Particularly when we are talking about what may be a consistent and livable existential attitude - for any of us individually, or for humanity generally - it seems like there will be far too much speculation involved behind any black-and-white, one-size-fits-all answer. Though we all do share in something called the human condition, we also exist in relatively different and unique circumstances, and we are each accustomed to various modes of being in the world, which can change over a lifetime. To propose that there is one perfect cocktail of meaning, purpose, and value that suits all of us, in all the diversity of our positions, may in fact require the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good creator to orchestrate such a fantastic miracle!

If nothing else, though, we can surely say that Craig's favored recipe for meaning depends on his understanding of the absurd. For Craig, absurdity is more of a mindset than a reality. It is a problem to be cured. The life of the atheist is absurd only in that she does not acknowledge God, and so has no claim to ultimate significance, purpose, and value. Absurdity on this view is practically a placeholder for irrationality. Craig says of the godless perspective that it is "utterly without reason." The absurd life is living with the irrational belief that we inhabit a godless universe.

II. Divorced From Life

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes the absurd feeling as being divorced from one's life. We encounter a tragic divide between our desires for reality and reality as it really is, perhaps most of all in those humbling conscious moments of suffering and trauma. The desires we have for unity, purpose, and order clash with our experiences of a world that seems not to care about us, our dreams, or our plans. The absurdist finds herself a stranger adrift in a foreign world with no lights or illusions, unable to remember where she has come from and unaware of where she is heading. If she denies the absurd, she lives an inauthentic life, as if the world is so little different from her desires that the incongruities presented to her are not really incongruities at all.

For Camus, the absurd is fundamental to who we are. Our consciousness is what separates us from the world, what gives rise to absurdity.

If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation.2

The human condition is uniquely human in that we are consciously separated from the world in which we live. The same cognition that allows us to reason also isolates us from the rest of the universe. To be conscious is not just to think, it is to remember, to imagine, to desire, and, at certain times, to be aware of these things. We wish for much more than that our biological needs be met. We not only have a concept of the world, but we have the concept of what we need from the world, and what we need for our very existence to be meaningful.

Yet the world is silent to our pleas for this ultimate meaning, and no higher reality or perfect being can spare us from this fact. "What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me?" Camus asks. "I understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me – that is what I understand." Even if a god exists, and has endowed the universe with its purposes, there remains doubt that these purposes would matter to us. Thomas Nagel, in his own essay on the absurd, interprets Camus as saying that "the world might satisfy [our] demands if it were different." In opposition to this, Nagel claims absurdity derives "not from a collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision within ourselves."3 However, Camus' point is not just that the world has no seemingly in-built meaning to it, but that we, as the conscious and reasoning creatures we are, do not even belong to this world.

For the world to meet our demands, we would have to be the world. Likewise, we would have to be God in order for God to rescue us from absurdity. Such radical alternatives seem almost unthinkable, though, in that they would undermine the human condition itself. Instead, we know and experience the world as alien - we find ourselves afloat in a universe that shows no concern for our ontological needs, desires, or hopes. But oh, how we still need, and desire, and hope! We long for ultimate meaning, that we might be reunited with God, the world, and the totality of it all. However, this is not the existence we have, and if some day it should be, it will mean the end of the self. At the depths of our being, we feel the weight of the absurd.

Many people have collapsed under the burden of absurdity. Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus to address the question of suicide, which is commonly seen as the end result of life losing its value and meaning. One way of responding to the absurd dilemma is to deny one of its components. It may seem as if those who commit suicide have done the only reasonable thing in light of meaninglessness (this, in fact, looks to be an undercurrent in Craig's essay). But suicide does not actually stem logically from nihilism, Camus points out, when the decision to end one's life is to make a value judgment that life is not worth living. Rather, suicide is a denial of the absurd in that it removes the self from the world, and so eliminates half of the dilemma.

The absurd can also be denied through what Camus calls philosophical suicide. This is when we trade in the real world for comforting illusions. Religion tells us our desires for purpose, order, and unity can be met by God, or by a world beyond this one. Certain belief systems even have it that such desires are instilled by God to show us our need for him and bring us closer to him. Camus sees existentialism as another philosophical suicide, since it deifies the absurd, and so merely mystifies capital-M Meaning. On both views, the world is not silent to us, but has just what it is we are looking for, whether we know it or not.

Camus finds significance only in accepting life on its own terms, which has everything to do with acknowledging its absurdity. This is best exemplified in Sisyphus, that figure of Greek myth condemned to roll a rock uphill for eternity. Despite laboring under an aimless fate, Sisyphus carries on and takes his actions and his labor into his consciousness. In doing so, he silences all the idols and his fate becomes his own. "In the universe suddenly restored to its silence," Camus writes, "the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up." The fragility of existence becomes clear to those who see life as it is and not as they wish for it to be. Sisyphus knows the whole extent of his condition, and yet that lucidity which threatens him also "crowns his victory."

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It also happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.4

Our condition is absurd whether God exists or not. Happiness, taken in an important sense of well-being, knows this. The Greek word often translated as happiness, eudaimonia, comes from two separate words meaning "good" and "spirit." While this can mean having virtuous character, it also suggests a wellness of being, or put in a more familiar phrasing: it is well with my soul. Human nature is fundamental to Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia, and there is recognition of the need for modesty, to acknowledge our situation and our limitations. Seeing our condition as it is, seeing the absurdity of life, is not antithetical to happiness, it is, for Camus, paramount to happiness.

III. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the Absurd

Nearly a century before Camus, Kierkegaard wrote on the absurd. Of it, he says in the Journals:

What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act ... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection.5

This is one way of viewing the distance between the human being and the world. At some times, our mind pushes us towards what the world will not allow. We find reason retreats from decision, but we are unable to abstain from acting, and so we leap. We encounter the absurd in that interaction between our will and unyielding reality.

For Kierkegaard, the absurd demands faith. Truth, he writes in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is "the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite."6 If one can apprehend God objectively, one does not have faith. It is because one cannot do this that one must have faith. To maintain faith is to remain committed to objective uncertainty, according to Kierkegaard. Here, faith seems to be of first importance, not merely in a manner that keeps the absurd alive, but as a triumph of the believer. Faith brings hope. Thus, Camus says that by his "frantic adherence," Kierkegaard "is led to blind himself to the absurd which hitherto enlightened him and to deify the only certainty he henceforth possesses, the irrational."7 In short, "Kierkegaard wants to be cured."

Interestingly, Craig makes no mention of Kierkegaard in his essay, although he has elsewhere described him as "a bona fide fideist" who believed there is "ultimately no warrant for Christian belief."8 Of further intrigue is that Craig characterizes Kierkegaard's view as motivating the leap of faith by "showing how life lived apart from God ultimately degenerates into despair, boringness, and languishing in absurdity." As just pointed out, however, Kierkegaard's concept of the absurd actually seems closer to Camus' than Craig's. Camus may have criticized Kierkegaard for allegedly wanting a cure for this absurdity, but it appears clear that absurdity is not merely a life apart from God on Kierkegaard's account. This is even supported by Craig's own observation that the Danish philosopher thought Christianity itself absurd because of the incarnation. Why such Christian absurdity is not addressed or referenced at all in an article covering the absurd life and its relation to God is difficult to understand.

Craig does at least reference other absurdists in his essay, such as Nietzsche and Camus. In a few paragraphs, he draws on Nietzsche's famous tale of the madman who proclaims the death of God, and in another line he mentions the philosopher's break with Wagner over anti-Semitism. This is all the attention Nietzsche receives.

What does the death of God mean? Various commentators have contributed various thoughts on the declaration, but among them there has also been a good deal of general agreement. For Nietzsche, God's death meant the end of the systems of meaning and value that had sustained much of the world for centuries. When the madman says that, "We have killed [God] - you and I," the message is that our old ways of living and being in the world are now gone, and we are responsible for their destruction. Nietzsche does not say that their demise came about because people stopped believing in God. On the contrary, the madman realizes he has come too early; humanity is not yet ready to give up its obsolete evaluative traditions.

It should perhaps surprise no one that Nietzsche, author of The Antichrist, did not think the death of God could be solved by returning to the old faith and the old God. The madman's cry is not for the prodigal children to come home, for there is no going back. The 19th century saw advances in science, education, history, politics, religious criticism, and more, which helped escort humanity into a new age. With each new age and the changes it brings, we are forced to reconsider our place in this world, including where we stand in relation to our former structures of meaning. Like all traditions, Christianity continually turns to ask what its fundamental teachings mean today, in the modern world.
Nietzsche did not speak of the absurd as openly as Kierkegaard and Camus, but his works bear traces of it. Camus wrote of the absurd divorce between man and his world, and we see this divorce come from reason itself in Nietzsche. In the article, "Camus and Nihilism," Ashley Woodward explains as follows:

...for Nietzsche and Heidegger, the unity and existential meaningfulness of life depends upon continuity with an irrational background, a horizon of interconnected meanings and significances that orients our projects. For such thinkers it is precisely the turning of the light of analytic reason on every aspect of this background that has cut us off from it, diminished its significance, and set us adrift.9

It is not hard to take from this why an intellectual turn back towards God cannot resolve the absurdity Nietzsche finds in the death of God. He states in Twilight of the Idols, "One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by a living man, because he is a party to the dispute, indeed its object, and not the judge of it; not by a dead one, for another reason."10 What of God? If God partakes of life, or if he is life - additionally, if he is being, as Tillich thought - then he is just as much party to the dispute, and object of it, as we are. On the other hand, if God is beyond life, or outside of it, then we are confronted again by Camus' question. What can meaning outside our condition mean to us?

IV. God and the Absurdity of Life

We have now seen that, according to three of the major thinkers on meaninglessness, absurdity is about more than the choice to live without God. The absurd is not a mindset, nor is it simply that the world itself is without a priori meaning. Life's absurdity comes from the relation of the mind to the world. Like all else, Camus says, "the absurd ends with death." As noted before, even if God has created the world with ultimate purpose, value, and significance, it cannot matter to us, since we are separated from the world by our condition, by our consciousness. Absurdity remains.

Camus insists that in attempting a solution, we remain faithful to the absurd, and do not simply negate one of its terms in our response. He, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard agree on where absurdity arises, and all seemingly also agree, in their own way, that the absurd requires revolt. What interests me at this point is their shared conception of absurdity - coming from two atheists and a Christian - and how it contrasts with Craig's concept of absurdity. Craig agrees that the world itself is not absurd, but he does not agree that the absurd is in us and the world taken together. He believes, perhaps unlike even Kierkegaard, that God is a definite cure for the absurd, indicated by the entire argument of his essay.

As mentioned, Craig has it that absurdity arises from living with the irrational belief that we inhabit a godless universe. The atheist's life is absurd in either being consistent with their beliefs and thus living mired in despair, or in living inconsistently. "If one lives consistently, he will not be happy," Craig writes, "if one lives happily, it is only because he is not consistent." Additionally, this implies that it is not just the existence or non-existence of God that matters, but whether or not one believes in God. An atheist living without God in a universe where God exists would still be living an absurd life, according to Craig. This is much like Nagel's take, referenced above, that were the world different (having God in it), the absurd would not arise.

Note where the tension lies on this view. The atheist thinks she can live meaningfully without appeal to God. The fact of it is, though, that the meaning she needs can only come from God. She is unable to obtain Meaning on her own for all the standard theological reasons: she is imperfect, she is separated from God by sin, she lacks the requisite power or the goodness needed to make an adequately meaningful life for herself. This is her condition, and it is the human condition. Romans 3:23 says that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," as Jeremiah 17:9 declares the heart is "deceitful above all things, and desperately sick." 1 John 1:8 warns that, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

How are those who live meaningful lives with God able to do so? "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves," states Ephesians 2:8-9. "[I]t is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast." All these passages appear to suggest that we possess a fallen nature that cannot be overcome by any effort on our part. Grace is what ultimately saves the day, grace that can come from God alone. The apostle Paul speaks in the New Testament of two alternatives: being a slave to sin or a slave to Christ. We are left with no third option of making our own way. Our will collides with an unyielding reality, for even our desires to be saved, to enter into eternal life, and to live morally cannot be achieved except by divine will.

I do not want to over-stretch the comparison here. The Christian view does seem to say our desires for significance can be met. Even so, something of a paradox exists in that while nothing we do really grants us salvation, somehow salvation is given, and not indiscriminately, but to those who 'call on the Lord.' Another way of emphasizing what Kierkegaard and Camus have said of the absurd is by observing that we are incomplete, we are not whole. The point of most spiritual or self transformation is to be at home again, to no longer feel separated from reality, the world, or God. Craig believes it is possible for that to happen, but what he calls the absurdity of life without God belies a deeper problem, one where we are all incomplete and sinful. In our earthly, fleshly, human condition, we bear witness to this separation.

The problem is that this is where we are now. We are not yet in eternity or united with God in celestial bodies. We exist in and struggle with a world that does not answer to our demands for unity, purpose, and order. We may believe the world shows these things in itself, or that God has bestowed meaning on life, but these are inferences, suppositions, and hopes. Absurdity comes to us not as belief, but as conscious experience, the lucid feeling of disconnection. Blake spoke of psychic disintegration, Marx of alienation, and Christian theology talks of a God-shaped void. Though these ideas have their differences, to be sure, they communicate a common, powerful sense of the awareness of our divorce from life. The very core of Craig's essay, arguing our need for God, tells of something important we are missing.

It might be tempting to ask, 'What if God made us differently, in a way that we would not be divorced from life?' This question is already a step towards illusion, as are all the imaginative ideas that come with it. It is to surmise that the human condition might be other than it is. Of course, one can worry that this is too quick, and begs the question against other positions. Still, we seem aware of our separation from the world, especially when we struggle and contemplate our existence. Craig himself cites the familiar observation in his essay that man is the only creature who asks, "Why?" The same impulse that moves us to count ourselves as a special creation calls attention to the loneliness, the isolation, of humanity in the universe.

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. -John 15:19

The author of John expresses why Craig's account of absurdity is inadequate. In saying that God and immortality give us meaning, Craig places the cure for absurdity firmly outside this world, this life, and our condition. As such, it is presently unattainable. Explaining the "success" of biblical Christianity near the end of his essay, Craig remarks that on his view, "man's life does not end at the grave," and, "[i]n the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God." These are the conditions that make life meaningful for Craig. We are destined for another world, and yet we find ourselves in one where we do not belong, one which allegedly only has meaning in leaving it behind. Can that other world really matter much to where we are now?

No, say Nietzsche and Camus. If this life were to have meaning, it would be meaning that affirms this life, rather than meaning that negates it by turning existence itself into a means to some other end.

Conclusion: Living With the Absurd

Is it truly impossible to live consistently and happily with absurdity, as Craig has claimed? We have already seen the beginnings of one answer in Camus. Where happiness involves something like well-being, and an awareness of one's condition is implied in that, it is not so challenging to envision how recognition of the absurd can contribute to happiness. As Avi Sagi notes in Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, Camus' call to picture Sisyphus as happy is "a notion close to the Aristotelian model, which approaches happiness as a by-product of self-realization. The individual who lives the absurd realizes human existence to the full, and is therefore happy."11

Craig's reason for denying one can live happily and consistently with the absurd appears to revolve exclusively around an analogy from Francis Schaeffer.

Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God.

First, note the presumption behind where meaning, value, and purpose are located in this universe. Schaeffer locates them in only one story, conveniently the same story where God is located. More than this, though, there is no differentiation between different kinds of meaning, value, and purpose. In this respect, the analogy begs the question. Craig acknowledges that a world without God can still have "culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments" about meaning, value, and purpose. I have previously noted the common intuition that people have about the necessity of capital-M Meaning for grounding all the little meanings, and I have also noted the very daunting challenge this intuition invites for justifying any one 'perfect cocktail' of meaning above all others. It seems to me that placing meaning, value, and purpose solely on the upper story is an unwarranted assumption.

Second, Schaeffer's assertion that modern man "continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story," though he has no right to, is supported in Craig's essay by nothing else than accusations of inconsistency in the statements and behavior of select atheists, like Sartre and Camus. However, these allegations do not prove the stronger claim in Schaeffer's analogy. Even if some atheists have tried to have their cake and eat it too, it does not follow that this is the case across the board. Granted, Schaeffer's analogy is exactly that - an analogy - but since it is all Craig really brings against the possibility of living happily and consistently with absurdity, it deserves the scrutiny. It is also certainly debatable whether any of the examples Craig uses actually shows inconsistency.

To take one such example, Craig alleges that "Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life and the ethics of human love and brotherhood." If life is meaningless, how can you have values like love and brotherhood? Again, there may be a bit of a bait and switch going on, for it sounds as if Craig is dismissing those subjective judgments he elsewhere concedes to a godless world. If we take him as consistent in not dismissing them, then we might find reason to question his claim about Camus.

We must find a way to live with the terms of the human condition, rather than abandoning absurdity through denial, by philosophical or physical suicide. Camus saw that to live in the face of the absurd is to adopt a stance of metaphysical rebellion. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, a value also emerges from it. The absurd, he observes in The Rebel, "is contradictory in its content because, in wanting to uphold life, it excludes all value judgments, when to live is, in itself, a value judgment. To breathe is to judge".12 In Cartesian fashion, Camus takes the absurd as primary, as his starting point, since his project is to see if one can live "without appeal." Yet the value that emerges from his exclusion of value judgments is a value that comes from experience, from facing the absurd, and not from presupposition.

"The point is," Craig explains, "that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist. As Dostoyevsky said, 'All things are permitted.'" Camus' valuation of life is personal rather than an eternal value. At the same time, it is tied to the core of his being, for not wanting to deny the absurd through suicide, he must continue to be, and continuing to be is to find value in living. If all things are permitted, why not this? But Camus objects to this reading of Dostoevsky:

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It does not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim.13

If one is worried about the license that meaninglessness and absurdity may give, then, as Camus further states, "The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity."

Within that sense of divinely-ordained purpose, many throughout history have found ample justification for the most heinous bad behavior. It's all too easy for the stalwart believer to dismiss this point by saying justification was going in the wrong direction for those wolves of the faith, that they only sought sanction for the sin that was always in them. This can be agreed without sacrificing much. The absurdist knows we deeply desire meaning in our lives, to which the world is unreceptive, and the ways that we find, invent, and preserve our place in this world are frequently problematic, even destructive. This is why she turns inward, towards the absurd life and the lucidity it brings. It restores the universe to its silence, restores to her her joy, and causes her to say "yes" to life.